Beta vulgaris
Red beet, garden beet: its seed conceals a feature that few gardeners know about. What is taken for a seed is actually a glomerule, a small cluster containing 3 to 6 fused seeds. Each “seed” sown therefore produces several plants — which explains why thinning is essential here.
Characteristics:
-
Sweet flavor: one of the vegetables richest in natural sugars, delicious both raw and cooked.
-
Excellent storage: harvested in autumn, it keeps all winter in a sand clamp.
-
Easy to grow successfully: a generous yield for little effort, ideal for beginners.
Sowing advice:
-
Exposure: sunny.
-
Soil: cool, light, loose and clay-siliceous, enriched with well-rotted compost. Avoid stony soils, which deform the roots, and overly chalky soils. Never add fresh manure.
-
Method: rake the soil and remove stones before sowing. Sow from April to mid-June, directly in the ground, 2 cm deep in rows spaced 30 cm apart. Soaking for 24 hours in lukewarm water significantly speeds up germination. See how to sow your seeds.
Care advice:
-
Thin out without fail to 10 cm as soon as the plants have 3 or 4 leaves: since each glomerule emerges as a clump, without this step you will get only small, cramped roots. The young plants removed can be transplanted or eaten as shoots.
- Water regularly, especially during dry periods: irregular watering causes the roots to split.
Harvesting advice:
- Harvest before severe frosts, when the roots reach the size of a tennis ball — if they are larger, they become fibrous. Do not cut the tops off flush: leave 3 cm of leaf stalk, otherwise the beet will “bleed” and lose its color during cooking.
Beneficial companions:
Benefits for biodiversity:
- Its broad foliage covers the soil and protects it from drying out, while also sheltering ground beetles and beneficial insects.
- When it goes to seed in its second year, it produces long flower stalks discreetly visited by small insects.
Uses:
- Grated raw, oven-baked in its skin, in velouté soup, hummus or lacto-fermented. Its leaves, often discarded, are excellent cooked like chard — they belong to the same botanical species.
Harvesting your own seeds:
Beetroot is biennial: keep a few roots protected from frost and replant them in spring; they will go to seed. Harvest the dry flower stalks. Be careful: it crosses with chard and fodder beet, so isolate your seed plants. See how to save your seeds.
Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for all living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Volcanoes of Auvergne, we choose open-pollinated, non-hybrid varieties, tested for their germination rate, carefully sorted and packaged, with no chemical treatment. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to resow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.
Sweet, colorful and generous: beetroot keeps all winter.
